Great article on how people are helping prisoners solve advanced math problems in prison. Inspiring.
Math is giving meaning to many behind bars. So ya don't have to deal with paywall:
Pioneering Advanced Math from Behind Bars
Math research gives meaning to years spent in prison
By Amory Tillinghast-Raby
Edited by Madhusree Mukerjee
Three years ago Christopher Havens, serving a prison sentence of more than two decades for murder, published a discovery in number theory from his cell. Havens and three co-authors showed that a significant class of fractions often maintains a regular structure after being transformed algebraically. Remarkably, Havens had no access to computers, which are typically used for such calculations. Instead, he painstakingly pieced his research together by hand.
Now, a nonprofit co-founded by Havens has developed a computational programming platform using one of the few technologies accessible in prison: highly restricted, text-only email. As this new facility offers more opportunities, more incarcerated individuals are diving into advanced mathematics to give meaning to their time behind bars.
Havens, who dropped out of high school as a sophomore, began his math journey in solitary confinement. "It brings out the worst in a lot of people," he says. "Right above you, you’ve got this fluorescent light that never shuts off, not even to sleep. You’ve got these guys screaming. You have people kicking the wall." To escape, Havens began solving math puzzles—first Sudoku, then packets of algebra problems slipped under his door. "I would get lost in it for days," he says. "I would dream about it." By the time he left solitary, Havens was deep into calculus and venturing into number theory, which he would later publish in.
However, teaching yourself mathematics in prison means getting stuck—not just on a problem, but on how to find the solution. "Imagine you don’t have a professor," says James Conway III, studying measure theory from Ohio’s death row. "You’re on your own." After being released from solitary, Havens wrote to a journal at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, asking for a mathematician to correspond with. Months later, researchers from Turin, Italy, responded. Their first question: How is a continued fraction transformed by the operation (af + b) / (cf + d)?
Continued fractions are like mathematical matryoshka dolls, one inside the next, and Havens calculated formulas for specific transformations in these fractions—handwritten on notebook pages that covered his cell. "It took over two years to do the math," Havens says.
For those incarcerated, the days of solving 21st-century problems with pen and paper might soon be numbered. The Prison Mathematics Project (PMP), co-founded by Havens, is helping others in prison study mathematics. With mentorship in topics like combinatorics and abstract algebra, the project has paired 171 incarcerated individuals in 27 states with mentors. One participant, Travis Cunningham, is preparing to submit research on mathematical physics for publication. The project has developed a system to let inmates write computer programs using the prison's text-only email system.
The PMP Console acts as a relay. Inmates email their code to the console, a cloud-based system runs the program in isolation, and the results are returned. Havens has already tested this system with Carsten Elsner, a mathematician at the University of Applied Sciences for Economics in Hannover, Germany. They are working on Zopf, a continued fraction with a specific sequence of integers. Havens and Elsner hope to prove that calculating the greatest common factor among these fractions forms a twisting pattern.
But Zopf also has a symbolic meaning. In German folklore, a nobleman escapes a swamp by lifting himself with his braid. "Zopf" translates to "braid," and the name captures Havens’s own journey. Mathematics, he says, "lifted me out of the swamp."
Although the PMP Console has potential, obstacles remain. Sending an email can cost up to 50 cents, while inmates earn just 52 cents per hour. And some prisons have rules that prevent the sending of "encoded" messages, including computer code. Securus Technologies, a major prison e-mail provider, is reviewing the possibility of incorporating the PMP Console into its education platform.
Despite challenges, the PMP is not just a tech project. It's an opportunity for prisoners to rebuild their lives through mathematics. "Until I started studying math, my life had just been chaos and destruction," Cunningham says. "When I got my first text on partial differential equations, I learned what love is."
For Havens, this transformation is the essence of justice. "Justice happens when you begin to fix what led you to prison in the first place," he says. Though some debts may never be fully paid, more and more people in prison are turning to mathematics to escape their own swamps.